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Thursday, 24 August 2006

I leave London saddened and hardly elated by news that arrived on the Evening Standard paper.

You will recall that last week I noticed within a 5-minute walk, signs seeking information about grievous crimes that created a sense of insecurity about the city from the first night.

So, I left, I got a copy of the Evening Standard and the front page read, “Father is killed by teenage gun gang”. One could almost dismiss this as a typical drug dispute situation, but the detail reveals a deeper malaise in society that I am not sure is easy to address.

Standing up to be killed?

The father killed was a 22-year-old young man father of a 3-year old son and he got killed doing what we as a society has lost sight of and stopped doing – standing up to anti-social miscreants who menace our peace, property and lives.

Hardly 7 months before, a group of kids were throwing stones at his car, he came of his house and confronted the gang; he got stabbed in the neck that the stabbing just missed his jugular vein.

A rotten police for a rotting society

The police took calls from his fiancée every day for 5 weeks and still did not end up taking a statement from her, and after the police were supplied with the details of the perpetrators and so on, but no one got prosecuted for the crime that the kids deemed themselves untouchable.

The question is how kids end up with knives that they can be such a danger to society having had parents whose dereliction of parental responsibility has lead to the creation of these treacherous monsters who because they are under 18 never see enough of the toughness of the law when they offend.

The news we now have is, this very young family was terrorised since then to the most recent situation where the young father who had returned home after a confrontation with that self-same gang stepped out and got shot by a member of that gang.

The next obvious question as we learn that a 14-year old who cannot be named is arrested is how did a kid end up with a loaded gun with which he has wasted away a life?

A rotten police and a rotten job

Now we hear that the police are sorry for the way the initial investigation was conducted, well, they cannot be half sorry; the life of a young family has been ruined because the terminal point where the crime-investigation-prosecution-punishment chain should have kicked in at the first crime was left unaddressed because of police inaction.

One cannot begin to imagine what might have been going through the minds of the police when the young lady tried to report the first crime – could Canning Town in East London have been such a hopeless crime-ridden place that no crime was worthy of police attention?

Have we become so obsessed with prospective terrorist attacks that more intimate crimes no more attract interest and service?

Could, as in the case of Steven Lawrence a policeman detective have been manipulating and thwarting the investigation in favour of the suspects such that they can get away scot-free?

Taking back our society

We cannot begin to talk of the kind of people who brought forth this brood of vipers who have become a scourge on our society, who from youth have no concept of the value of life or property and have become a law unto themselves.

Sorry, is just not enough, relieving some senior policemen of their duties cannot begin to assuage the pain of that loss, in fact, apart from the prosecution of those youths; there should after a review of all the investigations of the police into the first crime charges of negligence, dereliction of duty and probably culpable homicide in seeking to address this murder should ensue.

We need to win our society back from the situation where it has become the playground of reckless criminal abuse and non-consideration for others.

Once kids get onto the first rung of a seemingly criminal existence they should be brought under strict supervision which in some cases should include confinement as well as monitoring, mentoring and vocational training – there is no scope for a politically correct assessment of this problem – society cannot afford to paper over deep seated social problems.

The parents should not only be named and shamed for allowed discipline and control to fail in the upbringing of their wards; whilst no one goes to parental school for childrearing; it is no excuse for unleashing devils unto our streets.

Institutionally incapable police

The police having been labelled institutionally racist are also becoming institutionally lazy in dealing with serious crime, it is unlikely that one can retain confident in a leadership that allows such serious issues to become headlines because requisite action has not been taken as needed to resolve crimes.

Just as I read on African Shirts a few days ago, I do not think London with all its culture, attractions and beauty is not close by far to the safest city in Europe

The heightened perception of vulnerability to crime needs to be addressed better as the deluded Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police suggests we can leave our front doors unlocked because of lessened crime, we find that we can still get shot at our doorsteps which it could have been prevented if the earlier stabbing had been given full police attention.